Vienna Blood

57

PROFESSOR FOCH EXCHANGED HIS frock coat for a quilted black smoking jacket.

His supper had been frugal-nothing more than a small portion of goulash. He had decided to forgo the pleasure of Frau Haushofer's impressive but very sweet salzburger nockerln with cassis sauce because he had been suffering from borborygmus of late and had come to the conclusion that he must be eating too much.

Frau Haushofer was a conscientious woman, and when the nockerln was returned to the kitchen, she immediately left her station by the stove and went up to the dining room to ask if everything had been to the professor's satisfaction. Foch was not disposed to provide her with an explanation. After all, she was only a member of his household staff. Rising from the table, he stated frostily that she had given him no cause for complaint. Foch instructed his butler that he was not to be disturbed for the rest of the evening-except in the event of a medical emergency-and then, quitting the dining room, he beat a hasty retreat to his study.

Foch closed the study door, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to pace. As he did so, he occasionally muttered to himself. In spite of his earlier abstinence, these vocalizations were accompanied by a grumbling commentary emanating from his intestines.

After much toing and froing the agitated professor came to a halt in front of a small line drawing. It depicted “The Wounded Man”-a form of instructive surgical illustration that had become popular from medieval times onward.

Foch rocked backward and forward on the balls of his feet. As he did so, the floorboards emitted a querulous squeak.

The figure in the drawing looked like a fugitive from hell: a soul condemned to the most appalling mortifications of the flesh. Naked except for a genital pouch, he stood with one knee bent and one hand turned toward the onlooker. His body was little more than a pincushion: every part of his anatomy had been ripped, torn, punctured, or lacerated by a weapon drawn from a vast and unusually comprehensive armory. A short sword jutted out from his forehead, a knife from his cheek, and a massive hammer hung from a deep gash in his upper arm. The trapezius muscle had been sliced through by a sabre.

Foch scrutinized the wounds, and considered the excruciating pain that such injuries might cause.

In imitation of Christ, the Wounded Man's side had been pierced by a spear, and numerous arrowheads were embedded in his knotted thighs. Foch took a step closer. The hand that had been turned toward the onlooker was, in fact, hanging loosely from the arm, connected only by a thin threadlike tendon. The wrist had been slit, exposing a circle that represented the truncated main artery. Curiously, the Wounded Man's expression was ambiguous. There was something about his raised eyebrow and crooked mouth that suggested amusement-even pleasure.

The walls of Professor Foch's study were lined with books; not just ordinary books of the sort one might discover in the personal library of any university professor. Among the usual technical works, histories, biographies-and classics such as The Iliad, The Edda, The Nibelungenlied, Goethe, and Shakespeare-were several tomes of considerable age and value. Foch had been an enthusiastic collector since his student days, and through a combination of shrewdness, perspicacity, and luck he had acquired many antiquarian volumes, mostly of scientific and medical writings.

In a glass case below the line drawing of the Wounded Man was Foch's most valued possession: a thick book, opened to display an engraved frontispiece. It was an original edition of De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (“On the Surgery of the Mutilated” by Grafting) by the sixteenth-century Italian, Gaspare Tagliacozzi. Within its dry, disintegrating pages, Tagliacozzi had described an inventive procedure for the reconstruction of human noses: this particular operation had acquired considerable contemporary relevance in Vienna, where syphilis had become rife and every sixth house was occupied by a doctor whose brass plate proclaimed him a “Specialist for Skin and Venereal Diseases.” Syphilis often damaged the nose, and because one of Foch's specialties was nasal surgery, acquisition of a biblical scroll could not have afforded him more satisfaction than did his ownership of De curtorum chirurgia.

Contemplation of this treasure had the immediate effect of calming Foch's agitation. The professor lifted the lid of the display case, inhaled the book's musty perfume, and smiled. It was as sweet as a flower. Then, closing the lid, he turned and walked over to his desk. An electric lamp made an oblong inset of red leather glow with incarnadine fury.

It must be done… Carpe diem, carpe diem.

Taking his seat, he pressed his fingers together and allowed them to bounce on his puckered lips.

Enough is enough.

Foch had been wondering what to do for some time. Since receiving the letter of reprimand from the dean, a reservoir of bile had been collecting in his stomach. It was this, most probably, that accounted for the professor's digestive problems. But he was not a very insightful man. He did not look inward often, fearful, perhaps, of what he might discover.

Earlier that year he had attended one of Professor Freud's Saturday lectures on the subject of psychoanalysis. But he had found the content insufferable: all that talk of repressed sexual urges and phallic symbols-it was obscene. He had registered his objection by storming out, making as much noise as possible. The idea of lying on a couch and telling one's innermost secrets to a smug, self-satisfied Jew who was preoccupied with filth filled him with horror. Even so, Freud's insistence that early experiences have a profound impact on later development had lodged uncomfortably in his memory. Foch was dimly aware of the distant events that had shaped him: his impassive mother, the precocious girl who lived next door, the icy fingers of the Czech nursemaid sliding beneath the eiderdown.

It must be done… Carpe diem, carpe diem.

Enough is enough.

He would write an open letter to the Zeitung, explaining his predicament. In due course, common sense would prevail, public opinion would rally in his support, and the dean-obsequious lickspittle hypocrite that he was-would be obliged to resign. This plan of action had been slowly solidifying as it curdled in the gentle but persistent heat of his own ruminative malice.

In preparation for his assault, Foch had laid out some paper, a gold fountain pen, and several volumes and periodicals. He would begin his argument by making an appeal to the sensible gentlemen of Vienna, calling upon the highest scientific authority for support. He reached for his first edition of Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Removing a silk bookmark, he opened the volume and began to translate the stately English prose: The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, than can women-whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands… Man has ultimately become superior to woman.

Foch grunted, and opened an old copy of an English medical journal called The Lancet. It was more than a decade old but he had saved it, knowing that a particular passage would one day prove very useful. The female is undoubtedly from a developmental point of view an animal in which the evolutionary process has been arrested or, more accurately speaking, diverted from the general to the particular, for special reproductive purposes, before the culminating point could be reached…

The professor picked up his pen and began writing. We live in troubled times. The commonsense values that have prevailed for centuries are now under attack, and nowhere is this folly more evident than in matters concerning the Women's Question. It is my belief that the admission of female medical students into the medical faculty of the University of Vienna is a mistake, and a matter in need of urgent review…

After justifying his position with reference to Darwin and various evolutionary theorists, Foch proceeded to give an account of several experimental studies conducted by Doctor Heydemann that showed that women were inferior in the senses of smell, taste, sight, and hearing. He then cited the work of many celebrated neurologists who had found a relationship between brain size and intelligence. It was quite absurd to expect the much smaller female brain to function as well as its larger male counterpart. Women were simply physically incapable of becoming good doctors. There are those who maintain that such intellectual differences as exist between men and women can be accounted for because of social inequalities. That is to say, women generally-in this and past ages-have received little in the way of education. But there is considerably less truth to this argument than is generally supposed. In the Periclean era in ancient Greece, women such as Aspasia were highly cultured, and counted themselves as disciples of the great philosophers. Sappho, Hypatia, and many others prove the existence of a class of women to whom the religions of antiquity had given a position of unqualified honor. Yet in those times, and in all subsequent times, the education of women has failed to have an impact on their eminence in the grand scheme of human endeavor. Their gender has not produced one great artist, author, musician, inventor, or scientist. As the traditional German proverb has long informed us: Long skirts, short senses.

Foch sat back in his chair, pleased with his invective.